Hi danno. just shot about 50 doll shots in the studio with white and black backdrops. To be honest sony has the best implemented histogram and zebras
of any camera brand with near perfect measurmensts. but lets face it ,in the real world you just take the good enough image into your raw convertor
and adjust the image how you want with practically no image degrading even if you not spot on with exposure. but i must say the zebras set to 70 are absolutly
spot on for skin tones, the histtogram tells you nothing inbetween highlights and shadows.
May 18, 2023
305
-
-
What is the difference between a histogram and zebra? I thought they were the same thing.
San x
-
-
Maybe you did, more likely you didn't.
In any case it has nothing to do with the op's query, so I don't see the point you are attempting to make.
-
Perhaps start your own thread if you need help with something instead of attempting to hijack this thread.
-
I had always assumed that it was a consequence of limited in-camera processing power - or that the developers prioritised other things to use the available power to the greatest advantage.
-
A histogram is a bar graph of the distribution of some value. For pictures, it's the distribution of tones in the image, from darkest to lightest.
"Zebras" are the shading put over areas of the image in the viewfinder, nominally to show where highlights are being pushed past the sensor's capability to resolve them, or more informally, "being blown".
Histograms can show where highlights are being blown, if enough pixels are in that state the right side of the histogram will show a spike. But if the blown regions are small and/or the image is of a really high resolution, the spike might not be apparent, especially in the small histogram in the viewfinder.
-
@WhyNot - this answer Jim gives here is the most concise, not-overly-technical & pragmatic answer to your question. The rest is (mostly) details.
Said somewhat differently, you have a higher risk of blown highlights (in some situations) when relying on the in-camera histogram that has already undergone all the processing steps that ILIAH enumerated above… as opposed to if you were able to rely on a truly raw histogram.
-
If you rely on the in-camera RGB histogram, you never get blown highlights (well unless there's a little amount of blown pixels below histogram's resolution). Main problem with the in-camera histogram is it shows highlight clipping when there's no clipping in raw.
-
That is not my experience with Sony, Nikon, Leica, Hasselblad, and Fuji cameras.
-
That's the classic view, but photographic histograms are often presented in other formats than bar graphs. Look at FRV, or Lr.
-
What conditions would cause an RGB histogram (that shows three separate channels) to show no clipping when there's clipping in raw?
I saw it at extented ISO 50 in Canon but it's a special case. -
If the lighting is well away from D55. If the subject highlights have high chroma, particularly in the reds and blues. If the camera white balance is set aggressively away from common values, or auto WB does that.
-
Yeah, many cameras' fake ISOs do that by design.
-
Under some lights, a WB coeff. can be < 1.
-
Yeah, I use a line graph in rawproc so the three channels can be easily considered. I like to point out the bar graph thing because histograms are about "buckets", discrete values, where sometimes I think we forget that and consider the depiction as a continuum...
The depiction I still can't wrap my head around is the waveform. I need to do some reading on it sometime, right now to me they just look like some psychedelic morphosis. 😆
-
That's very interesting, thanks @IliahBorg @JimKasson
-
When I'm writing the code and want to display multiple channels, I find a scatter plot the most useful. That preserves the "buckets".
